View: How crypto became the new subprime

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

stock market isn't the economy — which it isn't — then cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin really, really aren't the economy. Still, crypto has become a pretty big asset class (and yielded huge capital gains to many buyers); by last fall the combined market value of cryptocurrencies had reached almost $3 trillion. Since then, however, prices have crashed, wiping out around $1.3 trillion in market capitalization. As of Thursday morning, Bitcoin's price was almost halfway down from its November peak. So who is being hurt by this crash, and what might it do to the economy? Well, I'm seeing uncomfortable parallels with the subprime crisis of the 2000s. No, crypto doesn't threaten the financial system; the numbers aren't big enough to do that. But there's growing evidence that the risks of crypto are falling disproportionately on people who don't know what they are getting into and are poorly positioned to handle the downside.

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What's this crypto thing about? There are many ways to make digital payments, from Apple Pay and Google Pay to Venmo. Mainstream payment schemes, however, rely on a third party — usually your bank — to verify that you actually own the assets you're transferring. Cryptocurrencies use complex coding to supposedly do away with the need for these third parties. Skeptics wonder why this is necessary and argue that crypto ends up being an awkward, expensive way to do things you could have done more easily in other ways, which is why cryptocurrencies still have few legal applications 13 years after Bitcoin was introduced. The response,